Economic Beat

April Empowers

An improving jobs picture returns to the script

IT'S ALL BEEN ACCORDING to script, or at least nearly so. By the third quarter of last year, the economy finally began to grow fast enough to transform the jobless recovery into a recovery of the jobless.

Since employment gains always lag behind GDP growth, however, an increase of only 150,000-175,000 a month in nonfarm payroll employment was all you could expect in the fourth quarter. What we got instead was one-third as much. But...